Complete Works of William Faulkner

by William Faulkner

  “So come daylight enough to see; and I never sent Turl neither: I clumb up there myself and looked at that float. And there wasn’t no safety-valves weighting it neither and maybe he hadn’t aimed for them to be fastened to it where the first feller that looked in could a reached them. And even if that tank is forty-two foot deep I still could a opened the cock and dreened it. Only I just work there, Mr Snopes was the superintendent, and it was the day shift now and Tom Tom could answer whatever questions Joe Buffaloe would want to know in case he happened in and seen them thousand-pound screw plugs where safety-valves was supposed to been.

  “So I went on home and that next night I couldn’t hardly get Turl to run them gauge needles up high enough to turn the low-pressure piston, let alone move the dynamos; and the next night, and the next one, until about ten days when the express delivered a box; Tom Tom had waited and me and him opened the box (It was marked C.O.D. in big black paint but the tag itself had been wrenched off and gone temporarily. ‘I know where he throwed it,’ Tom Tom said.) and taken them screw plugs out of the vents and put the three new safety-valves back on; and sho enough Tom Tom did have the crumpled-up tag: Mister Flem Snopes Power-plant Jefferson Miss C.O.D. twenty-three dollars and eighty-one cents.”

  And now there was some of it which Mr Harker himself didn’t know until Uncle Gavin told him after Tom Tom told Uncle Gavin: how one afternoon Tom Tom was smoking his pipe on the coal pile when Mr Snopes came in carrying in his hand what Tom Tom thought at first was a number three mule shoe until Mr Snopes took it into a corner behind the boilers where a pile of discarded fittings — valves, rods, bolts and such — had been accumulating probably since the first light was turned on in Jefferson; and, kneeling (Mr Snopes), tested every piece one by one into two separate piles in the gangway behind him. Then Tom Tom watched him test with the magnet every loose piece of metal in the whole boiler room, sorting the mere iron from the brass. Then Snopes ordered Tom Tom to gather up the separated brass and bring it to the office.

  Tom Tom gathered the brass into a box. Snopes was waiting in the office, chewing tobacco. Tom Tom said he never stopped chewing even to spit. “How do you and Turl get along?” he said.

  “I tend to my business,” Tom Tom said. “What Turl does with his aint none of mine.”

  “That aint what Turl thinks,” Mr Snopes said. “He wants me to give him your day shift. He claims he’s tired of firing at night.”

  “Let him fire as long as I is, and he can have it,” Tom Tom said.

  “Turl dont aim to wait that long,” Mr Snopes said. Then he told Tom Tom: how Turl was planning to steal iron from the plant and lay it on Tom Tom and get him fired. That’s right. That’s what Tom Tom told Uncle Gavin Mr Snopes called it: iron. Maybe Mr Snopes hadn’t heard of a magnet himself until just yesterday and so he thought that Tom Tom had never heard of one and so didn’t know what he was doing. I mean, not of magnets nor brass either and couldn’t tell brass from iron. Or maybe he just thought that Tom Tom, being a Negro, wouldn’t care. Or maybe that, being a Negro, whether he knew or not or cared or not, he wouldn’t have any part of what a white man was mixed up in. Only we had to imagine this part of it of course. Not that it was hard to do: Tom Tom standing there about the size and shape and color (disposition too) of a Black Angus bull, looking down at the white man. Turl on the contrary was the color of a saddle and even with a scoop full of coal he barely touched a hundred and fifty pounds. “That’s what he’s up to,” Mr Snopes said. “So I want you to take this stuff out to your house and hide it and dont breathe a word to nobody. And soon as I get enough evidence on Turl, I’m going to fire him.”

  “I knows a better way than that,” Tom Tom said.

  “What way?” Snopes said. Then he said: “No no, that wont do. You have any trouble with Turl and I’ll fire you both. You do like I say. Unless you are tired of your job and want Turl to have it. Are you?”

  “Aint no man complained about my pressure yet,” Tom Tom said.

  “Then you do like I tell you,” Snopes said. “You take that stuff home with you tonight. Dont let nobody see you, even your wife. And if you dont want to do it, just say so. I reckon I can find somebody that will.”

  So Tom Tom did. And each time the pile of discarded fittings accumulated again, he would watch Snopes test out another batch of brass with his magnet for Tom Tom to take home and hide. Because Tom Tom had been firing boilers for forty years now, ever since he became a man, and these three for the twenty they had been there, since it was he who built the first fires beneath them. At first he had fired one boiler and he had got five dollars a month for it. Now he had the three and he got sixty dollars a month, and now he was sixty and he owned his little cabin and a little piece of corn land and a mule and wagon to ride to church in twice each Sunday, with a gold watch and the young wife which was the last new young wife he would probably have too.

  Though all Mr Harker knew at this time was that the junked metal would accumulate slowly in the corner behind the boilers, then suddenly disappear overnight; now it became his nightly joke to enter the plant with his busy bustling air and say to Turl: “Well, I notice that-ere little engine is still running. There’s a right smart of brass in them bushings and wrist-pins, but I reckon they’re moving too fast to hold that magnet against. But I reckon we’re lucky, at that. I reckon he’d sell them boilers too if he knowed any way you and Tom Tom could keep up steam without them.”

  Though he — Mr Harker — did tell what came next, which was at the first of the year, when the town was audited: “They come down here, two of them in spectacles. They went over the books and poked around ever where, counting ever thing in sight and writing it down. Then they went back to the office and they was still there at six oclock when I come on. It seems there was something a little out; it seems there was some old brass fittings wrote down in the books, except that that brass seemed to be missing or something. It was on the books all right, and the new valves and truck that had replaced it was there. But be durn if they could find a one of them old fittings except one busted bib that had done got mislaid beyond magnet range you might say under a work bench some way or other. It was right strange. So I went back with them and held the light while they looked again in all the corners, getting a right smart of sut and grease and coaldust on them white shirts. But that brass just naturally seemed to be plumb gone. So they went away.

  “And the next morning they come back. They had the city clerk with them this time and they beat Mr Snopes down here and so they had to wait until he come in in his check cap and his chew of tobacco, chewing and looking at them while they hemmed and hawed until they told him. They was right sorry; they hemmed and hawed a right smart being sorry, but there wasn’t nothing else they could do except come back on him being as he was the superintendent; and did he want me and Turl and Tom Tom arrested right now or would tomorrow do? And him standing there chewing, with his eyes looking like two gobs of cup grease on a hunk of raw dough, and them still telling him how sorry they was.

  “ ‘How much does it come to?’ he says.

  “ ‘Two hundred and eighteen dollars and fifty-two cents, Mr Snopes.’

  “ ‘Is that the full amount?’

  “ ‘We checked our figgers twice, Mr Snopes.’

  “ ‘All right,’ he says. And he reaches down and hauls out the money and pays the two hundred and eighteen dollars and fifty-two cents in cash and asks for a receipt.”

  Only by the next summer Gowan was Turl’s student fireman, so now Gowan saw and heard it from Turl at first hand; it was evening when Mr Snopes stood suddenly in the door to the boiler room and crooked his finger at Turl and so this time it was Turl and Snopes facing one another in the office.

  “What’s this trouble about you and Tom Tom?” he said.

  “Me and which?” Turl said. “If Tom Tom depending on me for his trouble, he done quit firing and turned waiter. It takes two folks to have trouble and Tom Tom aint but one, I dont care how big he is.”r />
  “Tom Tom thinks you want to fire the day shift,” Mr Snopes said.

  Turl was looking at everything now without looking at anything. “I can handle as much coal as Tom Tom,” he said.

  “Tom Tom knows that too,” Mr Snopes said. “He knows he’s getting old. But he knows there aint nobody else can crowd him for his job but you.” Then Mr Snopes told him how for two years now Tom Tom had been stealing brass from the plant and laying it on Turl to get him fired; how only that day Tom Tom had told him, Mr Snopes, that Turl was the thief.

  “That’s a lie,” Turl said. “Cant no nigger accuse me of stealing something I aint, I dont care how big he is.”

  “Sho,” Mr Snopes said. “So the thing to do is to get that brass back.”

  “Not me,” Turl said. “That’s what they pays Mr Buck Conner for.” Buck Connors was the town marshal.

  “Then you’ll go to jail sho enough,” Snopes said. “Tom Tom will say he never even knowed it was there. You’ll be the only one that knew that. So what you reckon Mr Conner’ll think? You’ll be the one that knowed where it was hid at, and Buck Conner’ll know that even a fool has got more sense than to steal something and hide it in his own corn crib. The only thing you can do is, get that brass back. Go out there in the daytime, while Tom Tom is here at work, and get that brass and bring it to me and I’ll put it away to use as evidence on Tom Tom. Or maybe you dont want that day shift. Say so, if you dont. I can find somebody else.”

  Because Turl hadn’t fired any boilers forty years. He hadn’t done anything at all that long, since he was only thirty. And if he were a hundred, nobody could accuse him of having done anything that would aggregate forty years net. “Unless tomcatting at night would add up that much,” Mr Harker said. “If Turl ever is unlucky enough to get married he would still have to climb in his own back window or he wouldn’t even know what he come after. Aint that right, Turl?”

  So, as Mr Harker said, it was not Turl’s fault so much as Snopes’s mistake. “Which was,” Mr Harker said, “when Mr Snopes forgot to remember in time about that young light-colored new wife of Tom Tom’s. To think how he picked Turl out of all the Negroes in Jefferson, that’s prowled at least once — or tried to — every gal within ten miles of town, to go out there to Tom Tom’s house knowing all the time how Tom Tom is right here under Mr Snopes’s eye wrastling coal until six oclock a m and then with two miles to walk down the railroad home, and expect Turl to spend his time out there” (Gowan was doing nearly all the night firing now. He had to; Turl had to get some sleep, on the coal pile in the bunker after midnight. He was losing weight too, which he could afford even less than sleep.) “hunting anything that aint hid in Tom Tom’s bed. And when I think about Tom Tom in here wrastling them boilers in that-ere same amical cuckolry like what your uncle says Miz Snopes and Mayor de Spain walks around in, stealing brass so he can keep Turl from getting his job away from him, and all the time Turl is out yonder tending by daylight to Tom Tom’s night homework, sometimes I think I will jest die.”

  He was spared that; we all knew it couldn’t last much longer. The question was, which would happen first: if Tom Tom would catch Turl, or if Mr Snopes would catch Turl, or if Mr Harker really would burst a blood vessel. Mr Snopes won. He was standing in the office door that evening when Mr Harker, Turl and Gowan came on duty; once more he crooked his finger at Turl and once more they stood facing each other in the office. “Did you find it this time?” Mr Snopes said.

  “Find it which time?” Turl said.

  “Just before dark tonight,” Mr Snopes said. “I was standing at the corner of the crib when you crawled out of that corn patch and climbed in that back window.” And now indeed Turl was looking everywhere fast at nothing. “Maybe you are still looking in the wrong place,” Mr Snopes said. “If Tom Tom had hid that iron in his bed, you ought to found it three weeks ago. You take one more look. If you dont find it this time, maybe I better tell Tom Tom to help you.” Turl was looking fast at nothing now.

  “I’m gonter have to have three or four extra hours off tomorrow night,” he said. “And Tom Tom gonter have to be held right here unto I gets back.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Snopes said.

  “I mean held right here unto I walks in and touches him,” Turl said. “I dont care how late it is.”

  “I’ll see to that,” Snopes said.

  Except that it had already quit lasting any longer at all; Gowan and Mr Harker had barely reached the plant the next evening when Mr Harker took one quick glance around. But before he could even speak Mr Snopes was standing in the office door, saying, “Where’s Tom Tom?” Because it wasn’t Tom Tom waiting to turn over to the night crew: it was Tom Tom’s substitute, who fired the boilers on Sunday while Tom Tom was taking his new young wife to church; Gowan said Mr Harker said,

  “Hell fire,” already moving, running past Mr Snopes into the office and scrabbling at the telephone. Then he was out of the office again, not even stopping while he hollered at Gowan: “All right, Otis” — his nephew or cousin or something who had inherited the saw mill, who would come in and take over when Mr Harker wanted a night off— “Otis’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Jest do the best you can until then.”

  “Hold up,” Gowan said. “I’m going too.”

  “Durn that,” Mr Harker said, still running, “I seen it first:” on out the back where the spur track for the coal cars led back to the main line where Tom Tom would walk every morning and evening between his home and his job, running (Mr Harker) in the moonlight now because the moon was almost full. In fact, the whole thing was full of moonlight when Mr Harker and Turl appeared peacefully at the regular hour to relieve Tom Tom’s substitute the next evening:

  “Yes sir,” Mr Harker told Gowan, “I was jest in time. It was Turl’s desperation, you see. This would be his last go-round. This time he was going to have to find that brass, or come back and tell Mr Snopes he couldn’t, in either case that country picnic was going to be over. So I was jest in time to see him creep up out of that corn patch and cross the moonlight to that back window and tomcat through it; jest exactly time enough for him to creep across the room to the bed and likely fling the quilt back and lay his hand on meat and say, ‘Honeybunch, lay calm. Papa’s done arrived.’ “ And Gowan said how even twenty-four hours afterward he partook for the instant of Turl’s horrid surprise, who believed that at that moment Tom Tom was two miles away at the power plant waiting for him (Turl) to appear and relieve him of the coal scoop; — Tom Tom lying fully dressed beneath the quilt with a naked butcher knife in his hand when Turl flung it back.

  “Jest exactly time enough,” Mr Harker said. “Jest exactly as on time as two engines switching freight cars. Tom Tom must a made his jump jest exactly when Turl whirled to run, Turl jumping out of the house into the moonlight again with Tom Tom and the butcher knife riding on his back so that they looked jest like — What do you call them double-jointed half-horse fellers in the old picture books?”

  “Centaur,” Gowan said.

  “ — looking jest like a centawyer running on its hind legs and trying to ketch up with itself with a butcher knife about a yard long in one of its extry front hoofs until they run out of the moonlight again into the woods. Yes sir, Turl aint even half as big as Tom Tom, but he sho toted him. If you’d a ever bobbled once, that butcher knife would a caught you whether Tom Tom did or not, wouldn’t it?”

  “Tom Tom a big buck man,” Turl said. “Make three of me. But I toted him. I had to. And whenever I would fling my eye back and see the moon shining on that butcher knife I could a picked up two more like him without even slowing down.” Turl said how at first he just ran; it was only after he found himself — or themself — among the trees that he thought about trying to rake Tom Tom off against the trunk of one. “But he helt on so tight with that one arm that whenever I tried to bust him against a tree I busted myself too. Then we’d bounce off and I’d catch another flash of moonlight on that nekkid blade and all I could do was j
ust run.

  “ ‘Bout then was when Tom Tom started squalling to let him down. He was holding on with both hands now, so I knowed I had done outrun that butcher knife anyway. But I was good started then; my feets never paid Tom Tom no more mind when he started squalling to stop and let him off than they done me. Then he grabbed my head with both hands and started to wrenching it around like I was a runaway bareback mule, and then I seed the ditch too. It was about forty foot deep and it looked a solid mile across but it was too late then. My feets never even slowed up. They run as far as from here to that coal pile yonder out into nekkid air before we even begun to fall. And they was still clawing moonlight when me and Tom Tom hit the bottom.”

  The first thing Gowan wanted to know was, what Tom Tom had used in lieu of the dropped butcher knife. Turl told that. Nothing. He and Tom Tom just sat in the moonlight on the floor of the ditch and talked. And Uncle Gavin explained that: a sanctuary, a rationality of perspective, which animals, humans too, not merely reach but earn by passing through unbearable emotional states like furious rage or furious fear, the two of them sitting there not only in Uncle Gavin’s amicable cuckoldry but in mutual and complete federation too: Tom Tom’s home violated not by Tomey’s Turl but by Flem Snopes; Turl’s life and limbs put into frantic jeopardy not by Tom Tom but by Flem Snopes.

  “That was where I come in,” Mr Harker said.

  “You?” Gowan said.

  “He holp us,” Turl said.

  “Be durn if that’s so,” Mr Harker said. “Have you and Tom Tom both already forgot what I told you right there in that ditch last night? I never knowed nothing and I dont aim to know nothing, I dont give a durn how hard either one of you try to make me?”

  “All right,” Gowan said. “Then what?” Turl told that: how he and Tom Tom went back to the house and Tom Tom untied his wife where he had tied her to a chair in the kitchen and the three of them hitched the mule to the wagon and got the brass out of the corn crib and loaded it to haul it away. There was near a half-ton of it; it took them the rest of the night to finish moving it.